Fragworld.Org offers the outcome of a Battlefield 3 Community Town Hall Summit where EA and DICE met with 75 members of the PC first-person shooter community to discuss the upcoming military shooter sequel. There's no text transcript of the proceedings, but the audio of the two-hour summit is available in a few different formats.

I did, but I made the mistake of believing you actually understood what "exclusive" means. If you can buy a product at numerous locations, it's not exclusive to one location. So you've been using the wrong word.

And Verno already explained about how Origin is required to be running to play BF3. It's worth noting that quite a few Steam games (even Steamwork games) don't require Steam to be running in the background, so yeah, Origin is like Steam.